We are delighted to announce Hybrid Moments, Harris Rosenblum’s third solo exhibition in New York, presented jointly by SARA’S and Foreign & Domestic.

Harris Rosenblum’s art investigates the spiritual potential of contemporary alienation. He is interested in craft, post-industrial materiality, manufacturing, and the novel intelligence borne by networks. He is a contributor and moderator for Do Not Research, a digitally native community and publishing platform. Rosenblum is a founding partner of Transcendence Creative, the first 360° corporation with a historical materialist approach to brand identity.

In the words of Travis Diehl:

“[Rosenblum] works in the niche between nerdiness and saintliness, depicting the struggle for belief itself—a squirm-provoking inquiry in today’s ideological climate.”
— New York Times, July 13, 2024

Four new paintings in Rosenblum’s Lovers series are included in the exhibition. Each work is composed from 40 individually printed polylactic acid plates stitched together into a single image. Rosenblum created custom machine code to manufacture the anisotropic appearance of brushed metal from plastic commonly used in food packaging. As light reflects with a strong directional bias – with and against the grain of the plastic – patterns shimmer and move with the viewer’s position.

Each unique work in Rosenblum’s Lovers series depicts, at true-to-life scale, an ancient dual grave of skeleton pairs, exhumed side by side or in a loving embrace, found respectively in Greece, Italy, China and Romania.

Bacchus is a tableau of imps caught in various states of ecstasy, tension or contemplation. Each figure is modeled on motion-captured poses from Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, revealing the expansive potential in otherwise mundane digital marginalia. The imps are presented on a hoof-legged table made of ebonized oak, steel, and printed plastic.

Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (C. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli. A nematode worm has exactly 302 cells in its nervous system, with two-thirds of these forming a ring in its head, making thousands of interconnections. All the electrical and chemical signals exchanged between these neurons are calculated comprehensively and in real time.

A mind running on hardware.

Rosenblum tests the boundaries of our moral imagination and asks us: If the computer is equivalent to a worm’s mind, is its pain any less real?

The title of this show is taken from the Helvetia cover of the Misfits song. I wasn’t a punk, I didn’t know the original until pretty recently. My friend Alexander showed me Helvetia when we were in college. He wanted me to feel Duster’s music the way he did. I remember him trying to get me to understand how much there was in the minimalism. The depth of the banality contained in the clip distortion of a tube amplifier, doped with digital pedals, put on tape twice, transcoded into low quality stereo rips, played from his laptop on speakers we found somewhere for free, in our living room in Oregon. He burned me a USB drive with a couple albums. I didn’t understand it, but reading a PDF of The Dispossessed, biking around the paved greenway next to the water, and listening to the seminal Stratosphere on repeat in headphones the next summer, it eventually got to me.

Listening to Duster in headphones is how I developed an ego in my 20s. Finding unreleased ripped tapes on torrent sites gave flesh to a skeletal haecceity I’d been carrying around as a self. I tried to make my GarageBand music sound like them. I put “Topical Solution” onto a mix CD for my wife, for us to fall in love to as we drove around in her car in the developing suburbs of Denver. All of the data and infrastructure around this part of my life could fit into a microSD card that costs five dollars. I think it might be the case that, no matter what informational sets describe the causal conditions for everything I am, all the pain I feel, all the emanating love of reality that rains on me constantly, the plans and production methodology for creating the entire world I’ve experienced could fit into that SD card that I could easily forget or accidentally eat and reintegrate.

Each new moment of love or connection is more mediated and causally entangled with productive technology than the last. I think people tend to focus on the banality of evil that emerges from these systems, but it is mirrored by a mundanity of beauty and transcendence. I wouldn’t have fallen in love in the same way if I hadn’t obsessed over which mp3s to burn in the right order to fit a 93-minute CD. The overdose of a loved one is sometimes accompanied by an animoji. Memes can be so potent they make you cry. The most heartbreaking story of all time can be extruded from aluminum as a heatsink. The train is made of a million pounds of steel and transistors, the mass-produced fiberglass seats constantly facilitate moments of kindness and effacement. And sometimes I forget that this is what it’s all for. That all the production, extraction, and revolution of reality is just for the extension of this pain and love and experience and being. That the promise of life is that I make the world a bit more like me, and the thinking, pulsating viscera of reality infect me too. And we act like twins that have eaten each other in the womb, as cancers and qualities of one another, fully constituent of the love and pain and being of experience.

The works in this show are all made of this material of the everyday. They are an attempt to use the mundane productive technology of our time to generate more hybrid moments.

— Harris Rosenblum